CIA

The CIA appears in the novel less as a visible institution than as a powerful destination for intelligence and a measure of the changing political calculations around it. Through Meg Williams, its contacts, and its prospective use of Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s findings, the agency connects the Madrid investigation of Nazi escape routes to Washington and international opinion. That connection offers leverage against Franco, but not a shared political purpose: the Republicans want to expose the regime’s protection of war criminals, while U.S. policy is shaped by its own Cold War priorities.

Intelligence and the Stauffer network

In Geneva, Meg Williams had encountered rumors of an escape route to Argentina but had not regarded them as reliable, particularly when they were mixed with stories about Reich submarines carrying gold. The information gathered by Sole Ruiz changed the picture. Clara Stauffer had turned her home at Galileo 14 into a practical support point: fugitive men received food and clothing, and the house’s office handled arrangements and papers. A baptismal certificate with German names and a birth date of 1907 gave Sole a concrete clue to the documentation traffic. Meg also learned that Jean-Jules Lecomte was a Nazi and a member of both the Rex Party and the SS, with a record that included appointment as burgomaster of Chimay during the occupation.

Meg persuaded Congressman Sal Burnstein, who had spent months investigating Nazi escape routes without finding convincing evidence of a stable organization, that the Stauffer network was a substantial lead. Yet evidence of its existence was not enough to establish the identities of Lecomte and Horst Fuldner, verify the status of Argentine visitors, or demonstrate that Stauffer was doing more than sheltering and clothing German fugitives. The CIA was, in the account given to Manuel, confident that South America was a destination for Nazis seeking to evade international justice. The investigators suspected that Stauffer cooperated with Juan Perón’s government and used Spanish baptismal records and administrative contacts to provide fugitives with documentation, but suspicion still needed to be converted into proof.

The political objective behind that proof was not identical for every participant. Burnstein and Meg sought evidence that could be presented to the United Nations and used to press the U.S. government. Manuel and Pablo de Azcárate saw a further opportunity: making Franco’s protection of men implicated in the genocide of European Jews an international scandal might force the Allies to break relations with Madrid and make continued non-intervention harder to defend. Their information had value precisely because it could travel through several networks—Sole’s observations, Meg’s connection to Burnstein, and the wider American political system—though each transfer raised the question of what the evidence could actually establish.

Manuel’s report and its risks

Manuel Arroyo Benítez was recruited as the infiltrator needed to test the suspicions from inside the Stauffer network. Using the assumed identities of Adrián Gallardo and José Pacheco Hernández, he made himself useful at Galileo 14, bringing newspapers, sharing coffee with the secretaries, and volunteering for errands. His employment and access let him observe the organization at close range. He saved part of his small allowance to buy a pocket notebook and pencils, intending to record what he learned; one of the secretaries’ errands took him to a parish to collect a baptismal certificate for José Pacheco, without telling him that it would be used to construct his own identity papers.

The information he eventually assembled could also bear on a separate trail: the fate of valuables and documents removed from the German Embassy in Madrid. Manuel suspected that shipments Guillermo García Medina had agreed to supervise might contain looted art, jewelry, antiques, and perhaps gold, silver, or foreign currency from the Nazi treasury. He connected Stauffer’s earlier attempt to introduce Guillermo to a man called Ban or Bam with Hans Lazar, known among intimates as Bam. The Allied Control Council had found Lazar in the embassy, and the Allies believed he had hidden its treasures and missing archive documents. Lazar’s authorized repatriation to Germany had been thwarted when he entered Clínica Ruber with appendicitis the day before his flight; his apparent illness left the whereabouts of the collection unresolved. Manuel’s suspicion brought the escape-network inquiry into contact with this other unresolved chain of evidence, but it did not itself prove where the missing material had gone.

The prospect of public action carried personal and political risks. Manuel believed that a Madrid arrest of Otto Skorzeny would be a conspicuous success for the CIA and could advance Meg’s career; she would arrange for a photographer to record it. He also believed such an arrest would not endanger the Stauffer network or implicate the Spanish government, since Stauffer could claim that she had invited Skorzeny under the name Rolf Steinbauer without knowing his real identity, while the Interior Ministry could deny knowing he was in Spain. The account does not present those claims as verified truth. It emphasizes instead Manuel’s certainty that Meg would never forgive him for having met Skorzeny at a party without turning him over. The likely publicity of the operation and the fragility of the larger investigation were thus bound together with a personal breach of trust.

From Madrid to Washington

In Buenos Aires, the American connection remained active through Meg’s contact at the U.S. embassy, Fred Goodwin. Manuel reached Goodwin by telephone in mid-February, then met him in the basement of the Librería del Colegio, near Plaza de Mayo, at a time arranged to ensure the place would be empty. The meeting placed Manuel’s field intelligence within an American channel without making him simply an agent of American policy: his earlier agreement with Azcárate had aimed to document the sheltering of Nazi fugitives and to create pressure on Franco.

By 16 February 1950, the investigation had reached a decisive reporting stage. Meg told Rafael Cuesta Sánchez that Burnstein had received Manuel’s report and that it was substantially more than she had expected. She was being sent back to Washington before publication to protect her from possible repercussions. The next steps would require support in Congress and an effort to bring Spain into the newspapers and public debate; Meg warned that this could take many months. The expected political effect remained conditional. The report had arrived, but publication, public pressure, and consequences for Franco were still matters of effort and uncertainty rather than accomplished outcomes.

Cold War limits

The novel’s later historical account places the CIA within a broader U.S. policy that could favor anticommunist military rule over resistance to state violence. After the 1976 Argentine coup, Washington’s diplomatic approach, as described in the narrative, treated military dictatorships as instruments in the international struggle against communism and supported them despite the consequences. That context matters to the earlier investigation: the American agency and the Republicans could converge around exposing Nazi networks without sharing a durable political program.

The account connects this Cold War framework to Argentina’s machinery of terror. Before the coup, President María Estela Martínez de Perón’s decree of 5 February 1975 initiated Operation Independence, formally directed against guerrillas in Tucumán but used to divide the country into five military zones and grant their commanders broad repressive powers. The operation targeted civilians as well as guerrillas, including teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious figures, and served as a precursor to the later dictatorship. From 1976 to 1982, the military regime forcibly disappeared thousands of people; the estimated toll reaches about 30,000. Its clandestine system divided repression into specialized functions, from kidnapping, secret detention, and torture to executions, disappearance of bodies, and the theft and reassignment of babies born to imprisoned women. The account also describes the death flights, in which living, drugged prisoners were thrown into the sea from military aircraft.

This historical frame gives the CIA’s earlier role a pointed limit. The agency provides a channel through which evidence against Franco’s protection of Nazi fugitives might reach Congress and the public, but the novel’s later account shows that U.S. anticommunist strategy could also support regimes responsible for systematic state terror. The contrast is not that intelligence has no political force, but that its force depends on the interests governing its use: an investigation may create pressure in one setting while the wider policy that determines American action helps sustain repression in another.